Quantitative Study of Nano to Submicron Scales Intracellular Structural Disorder Using Electron and Confocal Microscopies: Application to Cancer Detection

Cancer is one of the leading causes of death with over a million people being diagnosed every year. Many cancers eventually result in death because they go undetected in their early stages when they can be cured. The conventional techniques used for cancer diagnostics exhibit limitations in detecting early stage cancer, which has nano-scale structural changes. On the other hand, alcoholism is one of the biggest cause of health problems. This study examines the effect of alcohol in early stage carcinogenesis in the colon and healthy hippocampal cells of mice models by quantifying the structural changes in their nuclei via transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The technique utilizes the Mesoscopic Physics based concept of analyzing cellular structure by looking their light localization properties. In a seperate study, we also examined the correlation between MUC13 mucin and the tumorigenicity level in pancreatic cells via confocal microscopy imaging. The TEM and confocal images are used to construct and optical lattice system whose nano- to sub-micron scale mass density fluctuations are subsequently evaluated by statistically analyzing the spatially localized eigenfucntions of these optical lattice systems via inverse participation ratio (IPR) method. The results of TEM studies show that while the alcohol doesnot introduce carcinogenesis in healthy colon cells, it aggrandizes a pre-existing carcinogenesis. In hippocampal cells, alcoholism causes nanoscale morphological alterations in nuclei. The confocal studies of pancreatic cells show an existance of semblant correlation between MUC13 mucin expression and the stage of pancreatic cancer